November 4, 2018

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT (profanity alert):

Earlier today, the New York Police Department arrested the man suspected of vandalizing the Union Temple in Brooklyn by scrawling "Hitler" and "Die Jewish rats" on its wall. The man, James Polite, is also being investigated for allegedly attempting to set several Jewish institutions throughout the city on fire.

Polite, 26, is not a white supremacist. He is African-American, was raised in part by Jewish foster parents, and was sent to Brandeis University with the help of a charity run by The New York Times. He was a Democratic party activist, a protégée of former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and a one-time City Hall intern who, according to the Times, worked on "initiatives to combat hate crime, sexual assault and domestic violence."

But Polite's journey through so many of contemporary liberalism's most vaunted paths--academia, politics, activism--and the kindness shown him by Jews were apparently not enough to prevent him from contracting the mind-numbing virus of anti-Semitism. [...]

Coming, as it does, on the heels of the deadly attack in Pittsburgh, Polite's case merits a moment of consideration. After the shooting in the Tree of Life synagogue left 11 dead, some pundits pointed out that President Trump bore some measure of responsibility for the attack, if only for fomenting the sort of chaotic atmosphere that empowered and invigorated the alt-right.

It's a serious accusation, and one well-worth considering carefully and at length (Benjamin Kerstein does an excellent job promoting this very argument here). But in Polite we have an equally terrifying counter-argument, one that suggests that in today's America, no one side has a monopoly on hate and chaos. When the Democratic Party's leaders, including a former president and a former attorney general, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Louis Farrakhan on the stage at Aretha Franklin's funeral, is it any wonder that some are prone to listen when Farrakhan refers to Jews as termites? And listen they do: Earlier this week, a rabbi, Avram Mlotek, was harassed on the subway in Manhattan by a Farrakhan supporter who blamed the Jews for all the violence directed against them everywhere in the world.

And now, we've Polite. If the left is honest, it will spend the coming days and weeks asking how someone educated at a fine liberal university, on a scholarship from a fine liberal newspaper, could graduate from a job with a fine liberal politician--helping curb hate crimes, no less--to trying to intimidate and incinerate Jews.

A local Labour Party branch has refused to pass a motion condemning the antisemitic attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 people dead, according to a party activist.

Steve Cooke, the secretary of Norton West branch in the Stockton North constituency, said he was "aghast" that the motion was voted down after members claimed there was too much focus on "antisemitism this, antisemitism that".